I wrote:
...every single time my bot or I try to edit all of one of our big Reference Desk pages, we get a Foundation server error.
But -- curiouser and curiouser -- this does *not* happen when that same bot edits the Help Disk, which is equivalently big.
This is 100% reproducible. What could be different about the Reference Desks? They're not stored differently, are they? They're not in article space, it's true, but then, neither is the Help Desk.
Oh, wait.
Shoot, I think I know what the difference probably is.
Someone (User:froth) drastically reworked the implementation of the templates that construct the Reference Desk headers, and at just about the same time I started having all these problems. They were already pretty sophisticated and deeply nested, and from what he said about what he was up to, they're even more so now. I bet the server errors I (and the other Reference Desk users) have been getting *are* due to a timeout, not because of the time taken to upload these huge pages over my recently-flakey DSL connection, but rather, because of the time taken to interpolate and render all those templates...
If this is in fact the problem, I apologize for wasting this list's time with my reports. (But boy, have I wasted a lot of time on the problem... Sigh.)